‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recap: A Pocket Full of Phonies

“Ring Around the Rosie” is not about the bubonic plague. It’s not a song invented by medieval children about carrying posies to ward off infection, or about how the disease’s rash takes the form of a rosy red ring, or in which “ashes to ashes” is a corruption of the “ah-choo” sound of sneezing, or in “we all fall down” refers to death. The idea that it is is pure fabrication, an urban legend spread around by people who get a thrill out of inserting fake-deep, phony-dark meaning into entertainment for children. So naturally, it’s the perfect chunk of horseshit for Fear the Walking Dead.

Fear presents the fake factoid with a straight face in this week’s episode — actually named “We All Fall Down,” for god’s sake — as a way a doomed little girl to get schooled by sadder, wiser teenager Alicia, despite the fact that the Snopes page debunking the claim is “Ring Around the Rosie”’s second fucking google hit. I never thought I’d tell a show as tryhard as FtWD to try harder, but seriously, Fear writers, Let Me Google That For You.

Look, everybody makes mistakes, even glaring ones that anyone with an internet connection could catch before they make their way into one of the biggest shows on television. Hell, on this very episode Alicia and Nick marvel at the clear, smog-free sky, just minutes after we learn every major city on the West Coast is burning to the ground from saturation bombing with napalm. (Maybe the wind’s blowing east?) And there’s a slim chance, though the tone and presentation in no way indicates this, that FtWD knew Alicia was wrong when it gave her this dialogue.

But whether it’s the writers or the characters who believe this nonsense is largely immaterial. As the writer and artist (and, full disclosure, my partner) Julia Gfrörer put it, “Pseudohistory allows us to replace genuine, difficult self-examination with lies which support the beliefs we’ve already chosen for comfort.” The lie that Fear the Walking Dead has chosen at every opportunity is that life is a constant war for survival between the weak and the strong, and all affection, kindness, and empathy shown to those outside your immediate blood-and-soil connections is foolhardy and fatal. Of course a song children sing to have fun is “actually” about a pandemic that killed millions of (very real!) people in the world of The Walking Dead. Both fun and childhood are dead weight that must be jettisoned at all costs. To this show, it is immoral to be anything but pitiless.

Now, God knows I’ve complained about this shit a lot already, but “We All Fall Down” is like a case study in the phenomenon. At every juncture, it’s a terrible mistake for anyone to have treated any outsider like a human being and not a potential threat to be eliminated. It was wrong for Alicia to have communicated with that guy on the shortwave radio — he’s likely a pirate with military-grade weaponry coming to kill them. It was wrong for the people in the isolated nature preserve to which they flee as a result to welcome them — it leads to the deaths of, at the very least, the daughter, who turns into a zombie and kills the mother, who turns into a zombie and kills the father before getting shot by one of her sons in front of the other, younger son. “You caused this,” spits the eldest of the three children before stealing his sibling back from our heroes so that they can go kill his zombified family, and he’s right! Specifically, Nick caused it by uncovering the father’s cache of cyanide pills or whatever and getting caught in the act by the little girl he’s befriended, who takes one and dies before coming back to life and eating her mother. That’s entertainment!

At one point during the episode, Daniel Salazar, the literal death-squad torture specialist who serves as the group’s voice of wisdom and experience, tells his daughter Ofelia that he’d hoped to protect her from the kind of world she’s now surrounded by. “It’s okay,” she tells him. “It’s good, understanding this world. It helps me understand you. It’s cruel.” That it is — mindlessly, thoughtlessly so, with no examination of any alternative and therefore nothing to challenge its audience. It’s a show that presents a relentless battle against undesirables and outsiders as a heroic necessity. Its understanding of human nature is a lot like that “Ring Around the Rosie” story: Under the guise of hard truths is a pile of lies.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Leftovers for Decider.